You'll all agree with me: technology gives us some fun tools to play with. But having fun is not enough. Your company and yourself need to make money. This is what this article reminds us.
Here is the introduction.
Hang around with a group of business-technology executives for very long and someone's guaranteed to say something remarkably close to this: "The technology's the easy part. Changing people and processes, that's what's hard."
The importance of changing business processes to get full value out of IT investments is a concept that's been floating around for years, but it's taken on a new and broader urgency in the current economy. The huge investment in Internet technology in recent years, the demand for more real-time information, the tighter collaboration among business partners, and the grinding pressure to cut costs in a down economy all have IT buyers and sellers talking the same language about business processes.
The Y2K problems and the Internet bubble pushed many companies to buy or expand vast quantities of hardware and software.
Glenn Ramsdell, a partner in the business-technology office at business-management consulting firm McKinsey & Co, normally tells clients to develop a business process, then purchase the technology to implement it. But for a business that's already invested heavily in a certain technology, tailoring the processes to fit the technology might make more sense.
Here is an example.
Doug Patterson is a VP and CIO at Standard Register Co., a form-printing company with $1.2 billion in annual sales.
At Standard Register, Patterson is exploring technology that lets managers change business procedures with the mere movement of a mouse. For instance, the process of sending supplies destined for one manufacturing plant to another one can be easily changed using such tools. That's because the tools separate the application layer from the business processes, no longer requiring programmers to rewrite core code when a process changes. That, he says, empowers business managers in developing processes without needing IT to intervene.
Source: Eric Chabrow and David M. Ewalt, InformationWeek, August 26, 2002
5:36:59 PM
Permalink
|
|
